Tag Archives: Richard Busch

Michael McDonald, seen in 2005, had sued over underpayment of digital royalties. Click image for a photo gallery entitled 'Musicians in royalty battles.' (File/AP)

After suing Warner Music Group last May, singer-songwriter Michael McDonald, a member of the Doobie Brothers, has reached a settlement with the record label for underpaying him for online music sales.

McDonald’s win is the latest in a growing trend of settlements stemming from breach-of-contract suits brought by artists against the nation’s major record labels over payment practices for online music sales.

On the most momentous day of Nashville attorney Richard Busch’s professional career, his teenage son wondered if Dad had actually lost his mind.

Busch had glanced at his iPhone, then immediately jumped up and down before he bounded over to grab his son, Ryan, by the shoulders and shake the bewildered boy, yelling, “We won, we won, we won, we won, we won.”

The case Busch had just won wasn’t an ordinary victory for the 47-year-old music business attorney. After a years-long battle against Universal Music Group, an appeals court had just ruled in favor of his clients, F.B.T. Productions, the Detroit hip-hop producers behind rap artist Eminem’s musical success. The upshot was that Eminem (and F.B.T.) were entitled to an equal split of profits with their record company for downloads of Eminem’s music, instead of the fraction they’d been getting all along.

It wasn’t just that the victory would force the biggest of the world’s four major record companies to pay out potentially tens of millions of dollars in past and future royalties to F.B.T. and to Eminem. And it wasn’t just a personal vindication for Busch after a lengthy lawsuit against a company whose legal team had dwarfed his.